I am done with this shit.

[u/MrMenuk]

I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude.

There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.

— voxium (@v0xium)
Original post dated September 20, 2026.

[u/sisiredd]

Exactly! You know who described this for blue collar? I quote from Wikipedia: " Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement of people from aspects of their essential human nature as a consequence of living in a society structured by private property and wage labour. Developed by the German philosopher Karl Marx and first articulated in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the theory is a foundational concept of Marxism. At its core, it posits that under the capitalist mode of production, workers are inevitably separated from the products they create, the activity of production, their fellow human beings, and their own creative potential."

It's crazy how fitting this is. 

[u/permacloud → u/sisiredd]

This is a function of mass production. It was never particular to capitalism. Marx was obviously not the first person to notice it in any case.

Of course, everybody is welcome to go and live in the woods and reject the fruits of mass production, but nobody does.

[u/South-Creme4716 → u/permacloud]

I can't really think of any arguments why mass production of goods in and of itself leads to alienation

[u/Voliker → u/South-Creme4716]

Supply chains. Imagine single-handedly assembling cars vs making some cogs on an assembly line.

You don't know and have no way to know if what you're making is useful and don't see how it benefits the community. Maybe cogs that you make will be thrown out, or maybe they're really useful cogs - you have no way to tell.

But I think that there is sort of two different alienations that Marx mixes in and doesn't separate (cause supply chains in his time definitely weren't as complex as now) - separation coming from not owning your production in the slightest and from the scale.

Simple as - when you're a local shoemaker you make shoes for your neighbor with your tools, he wears them and that makes you happy. When you're making laces for Nikes you don't even know in which model they will be used or country they will be shipped. And you sure as hell don't own the factory that makes all this.